MR Videos

Imagine having a surgery with no knives involved. At TEDMED, Yoav Medan shares a technique that uses MRI to find trouble spots and focused ultrasound to treat such issues as brain lesions, uterine fibroids and several kinds of cancerous growths.

Mice, bugs and hamsters are no longer the only way to study the brain. Functional MRI (fMRI) allows scientists to map brain activity in living, breathing, decision-making human beings. Read Montague gives an overview of how this technology is helping us understand the complicated ways in which we interact with each other.

Brain imaging pioneer Nancy Kanwisher, who uses fMRI scans to see activity in brain regions (often her own), shares what she and her colleagues have learned: The brain is made up of both highly specialized components and general-purpose “machinery.” Another surprise: There’s so much left to learn.

As an expert on cutting-edge digital displays, Mary Lou Jepsen studies how to show our most creative ideas on screens. And as a brain surgery patient herself, she is driven to know more about the neural activity that underlies invention, creativity, thought. She meshes these two passions in a rather mind-blowing talk on two cutting-edge brain st…

Musician and researcher Charles Limb wondered how the brain works during musical improvisation — so he put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out. What he and his team found has deep implications for our understanding of creativity of all kinds.

Neuroscientist and inventor Christopher deCharms demonstrates a new way to use fMRI to show brain activity — thoughts, emotions, pain — while it is happening. In other words, you can actually see how you feel.

Medical scans can produce thousands of images for a single patient in seconds, but how do doctors know what’s useful? Scientific visualization expert Anders Ynnerman shows us sophisticated new tools — like virtual autopsies — for analyzing our data, and hints at the sci-fi-sounding medical technologies coming up next. This talk contains some g…

When she’s experiencing hallucinations, artist Sue Morgan feels compelled to draw; to ‘get it out of her head’. Sue was diagnosed with schizophrenia about 20 years ago. The drawing is therapeutic, but it’s also Sue’s way of expressing the complex and sometimes frightening secret world in her head. In this film Sue meets Sukhi Shergill, a clinician and researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. He’s also making pictures, but using MRI to peer inside the brains of schizophrenia patients.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is routinely used in hospitals to image internal structure and blood flow within the human body. Research has shown that it is possible to harness these techniques to study non-biological systems, with many applications across the physical sciences and engineering. Professor Lynn Gladden explained how processes occurring within optically opaque objects can be revealed, from imaging flow fields in plant cells to mapping chemical conversion within catalytic reactors. Recent advances enable bespoke implementations of the MRI method to be applied to ever more challenging systems, providing insights which cannot be obtained using any other measurement technique.

Until recently, little was known about how the human brain develops. In the past 15 years, new technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have enabled us to gain insights into how the human brain changes across the lifespan. Research has demonstrated that brain development is much more protracted than previously thought, continuing in some regions throughout adolescence and early adulthood. Some parts of the brain undergo a period of reorganisation during the teenage years, both in terms of structure, function and related behaviour. These new insights into neurocognitive development suggest that adolescence is a period of profound change and opportunity.

This video illustrates real-time MRI of vocal performance. It includes examples from a soprano and an emcee/beatboxer. This video was featured at the Sounds and Visions Session, of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) Scientific Sessions, May 2006, Seattle.

This video shows MRI and CT scans used to create 3-D images of mollusk bodies so that scientists can study them without using dissection or other destructive techniques. The scans shown here were developed by Post-doctoral Fellow Alex Ziegler along with colleagues at Harvard’s Center for Brain Science and Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht in Germany.